Saturday was taken up by travelling to Exeter for a beautiful service in the Cathedral organised by Martyn Goss, Diocesan Environment Officer for the Exeter Diocese. Cathedral clergy and staff used the opportunity of renaming a chapel within the Cathedral to stage a truly beautiful service, and launch the Reclaim Christmas campaign.
From there I travelled down to Exmouth on late Saturday to meet up with an old and dear friend, Peter Braine of the United Reformed Church, and his wife Sheila. On Sunday, Peter led the service in his church, and invited me to address the 80 or so who turned up in the rain and wind that morning to hear about the Reclaim Christmas campaign. And then later in the day, the Church hosted a meeting of about 60 people from the town on the theme of ‘the local and the global’ – attended by Hugh Squire the local MP, and the Mayor of Exmouth. What a wonderful sense of community that small church has generated! I was very impressed.
On Saturday in Exeter, I began my talk by referring to the pirates that had held up an oil tanker in the Indian Ocean last week, and reminded the audience that these pirates were once fishermen off the coast of Somalia. Thanks to the depletion of the fish stocks off their coasts by bigger vessels owned by firms in much richer countries, Somalian fishermen have turned to pirating.
This sequence of events reminded me of a beautiful poem, written by an anonymous poet at the time of Enclosures between 1760 and 1820 when common land was privatised and peasants stripped of access to common land, by powerful politicians and landowners.
I read the poem to the Exeter Cathedral Congregation, and it went down so well I had to promise to post it on our website, for all to use and distribute. So here it is:
THE GOOSE AND THE COMMON
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
ANON
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Had a weird Saturday. Spent part of it at the Labour Party's Compass conference in London ('Born Free and Equal') and another part watching thousands of cyclists ride by, cycling as they were when born - stark staring naked! (The latter was much more fun of course and was a powerful and assertive statement of against oil dependency and car culture and also an assertion of positive vulnerability 'Pass wide and slow. I am easily hurt'.)
At the Compass conference heard the Rt. Hon. Douglas Alexander MP, Minister for international development say something surprising. A questioner had asked why the government, treating the electorate as a market, had assumed only 'right-wing' demand in the market, instead of 'creating demand' for progressive ideas in the way that Barak Obama succeeded in doing with his campaigning.
In response the Honourable Minister said this, and I paraphrase: social democracy and progressive ideas was built on two pillars, the trade union movement and faith organisations. Now that both were in decline, and we live in a largely secular society....the social forces on which a Labour government depended for progressive policies were absent....
In other words, there is not enough faith (or trade unionism) to save the planet.
We could react to this approach in two ways. We could regard it as wrong-headed, and a lame excuse for an absence of progressive leadership by a government fearful of leading on the greatest question of our time: the threat to our security posed by climate change. Instead the government is inclined to abrogate such leadership to something abstract called 'the market', because, it would appear, faith organisations and trade unions no longer play a leadership role in society!
In other words we could indulge in yet another round of weeping and wailing about the weakness of the Labour government. Or we, as Christians and faith organisations, could rise to the challenge....as we are doing at Operation Noah..and exercise the kind of moral and ethical eadership that the market is incapable of.....This will then allow elected leaders like the Rt. Honourable Alexander, to follow.
I feel strongly about this, especially after a fascinating inter-faith dialogue at Heythrop theological college in London last week....when people of faith questioned how they could 'add to the debate' about climate change, without alienating others; without alarming others; and without paralysing potential campaigners with fear and defeatism. We should not, in my view, be 'adding to the debate'. People of faith, more than any other I would contend, whether they be Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims or Hindus all have their faith rooted in morality and ethics. They/we should be leading the debate on climate change; condemning the destruction and exploitation of those precious resources on which all life on our planet depends - and proposing alternatives.
And if we model ourselves on Christ, we will not do so by trusting to focus groups and 'warm words'.
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The ghastly tale of a man's abuse of his daughter and her children (one shudders to think of the abuse his wife must have endured) has shocked the world, but most particularly the people of Amstetten, a small town in Austria.
While the grisly details of the abuse have hit the headlines, the real story for me is the absence of community in a town that for 24 years turned a blind eye to the goings-on on their doorstep. The persecutor would frequently have to deliver groceries to the home in wheel barrow to feed the imprisoned family, but this detail was unremarked upon by his neighbours who believed him to have a small family of three.
We must hope that the people of Amstetten learn from this that having - more branded goods/more white appliances/more foreign holidays - is never a substitute for being - whole, decent, fulfilled persons living in community with friends and loved ones, sharing and supporting each other.
]]>We need Christian thinkers and leaders willing to intervene - loudly and angrily - in these crucial debates - and to do so in public spaces dominated by establishment figures like Lord Lawson, whose supreme arrogance permits him, a retired politician, to challenge a body of distinguished climate scientists who have over 18 years painstakingly built up a body of evidence and come to conclusions likely to cause Lord Lawson to have to tighten his belt and make sacrifices.....
Lord Lawson does not like that prospect at all, and so has invented convoluted and often deeply flawed scientific arguments to challenge a whole community of scientists, and a large body of alarming science....His voice is a lone one, but it has ricocheted around the establishment's echo chamber these last few weeks almost without challenge....Why aren't more Christian thinkers and leaders challenging him, publicly, angrily and authoritatively? Not by trying to outdo him on the science front (although that is not difficult) but by moving the debate on to the terrain of Christian ethics? Why does this man go unchallenged on this vital ethical issue of discounting the future?
We need more Christian thinkers and leaders to challenge climate change deniers - and engage in debates in forums like those of the Financial Times, where important decisions about our future are debated, weighed up and agreed. We Christians have become too accustomed to talking to ourselves, or to the already-converted....too used to engaging in arcane debates around matters that should be private...like one's sexual preferences. An introverted obsession with sex and with women is revealing.. (there! I got that off my chest... !)...but does little to challenge the unethical and thoroughly un-Christian stance taken by powerful and influential opinion-formers - like Nigel Lawson - and other decision-makers....shaping the amorality of our society's approach to climate change ...and therefore the very possibility of any future for coming generations....Humph! Humph! Humph!
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Below some quotes from the economist Wilfred Beckerman's letter to the FT (22nd April, 2008) castigating Lord Stern's assertion that society as a whole should consider future generations......
"How much certain sacrifice is one prepared to impose on people living today, most of whom are desperately poor, in the interests of future generations who, as it happens, are projected to be much richer? - a very respectable ethical foundation that goes back far as David Hume, the pioneer of 'agent-relative ethics'. This is the view that 'special obligations' - say to one's family, friends, neighbours, fellow citizens and so on - require giving their welfare priority over that of other people, including distant generations.
"Second, there is also no basis for Lord Stern's assertion that not many people would dissent from his approach. Personally, I do not think I have ever met anybody who would not give priority to the welfare of his or her family or friends over that of distant generations. And if I did I would quickly sever my relationship with them. Furthermore, one authoritative survey of people's attitudes to discounting the future reports a study restricted to residents in Washington DC and Maryland, which showed that the average respondent would trade off 45 lives in 100 years' time against one life today, and another study in Sweden that implied a trade-off over a similar period of 243 lives against one life today!"
]]>Am waiting for further feedback from supporters on this one: but if we do go with Mark's idea about boycotting flights....in particular budget airlines, is this really something that everyone could do? I mean how many people travel by air? Did Mark suggest that only 5% of the population get to fly? If that's the case....and do want to check that number....then its not going to be a mass action is it? Impact wise it would be big...but participation-wise?
What do others think?
]]>Having said that, they sure work their speakers hard! I was asked to make a speech at the beginning; was then marched off to run three successive workskhops in a row, before returning for the final session with the local MP, Ben Bradshaw, the head of Christian Aid, Daleep Mukerjee, the Head of Policy at CAFOD, George Gelber. Now I confess to liking the sound of my own voice - but there are limits!
The highlights of the day for me were the discussions in the workshops. I posed a challenge to the groups in each one, and I pose it to readers of this blog: the Operation Noah board is looking for an "iconic action" - one that would spread like wildfire through the churches, but that would be powerfully symbolic of what Operation Noah is trying to achieve - the care of Creation through a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; which in turn implies a reduction in consumption; and with it the restoration of a sense of community and well-being to individuals and to our communities.
In thinking about an "iconic action" we have in mind the key campaigning action of the anti-slavery campaign; the boycotting of sugar produced by slaves on slave plantations. The Indian movement for independence from Britain was inspired by Gandhi to boycott salt - which the British taxed heavily. Both these actions involved sacrifices for the campaigners - but also hurt those they were trying to influence...and helped to effect real change.
In our first workshop two wonderful women - whose names I foolishly did not note - proposed an iconic action: that we should all cut up our credit cards - symbols of consumption, of consuming beyond our means, with such consumption of course, driving up the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. They were both single parents, if my memory serves me correctly, and one had five children. Both had found that by cutting up their credit cards, they had regained control over their finances, and their lives. Above all they had learned to do without, and were happier for it.
The idea came up in the second workshop too. The third workshop was more interested in broader issues, until someone who had heard about the first workshop mentioned "cutting up credit cards".
It would be great to know what others think of this idea...Especially given the obstacles put up by the financial system. BT now charges me a hefty £3.50 for paying by cheque; and I noted last week that Marks and Spencer will in future refuse to accept cheques. So if we cut up credit cards, do we go back to cash?
What do others think? Please write and let me know...
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